Science Data Products Forum

Background and Purpose

The ESO Science Data Products Forum is a platform for sharing ideas,methods, software and data to assist with the production of science data products from ESO telescopes. The forum is a service for the ESO community.Contributions are by general users of the ESO instruments. While ESO monitors the contents of the forum and will remove wrong information when it comes to our attention, we can not guarantee that information provided here is correct.Software programs or calibration data posted in this forum are neither tested,endorsed nor supported by ESO. This also applies to posts by users with ESO affiliation. Official help for users is provided by the ESO User Support Department. The official ESO data reduction pipelines and documentation can be down loaded here, their status is described in the quality control pages.

How to use this forum

We encourage posts about any topic related to the reduction, calibration and analysis of science data from ESO instruments. Posts might simply describe problems encountered with the data reduction, or offer solutions to such problems. Software, calibration data or documents up to 100MB in size can be attached to any post.This forum is not meant to distribute scientific results or data products to the community. Science data products are distributed by the ESO archive and can be contributed by contacting the External Data Products Group.

Signing on

It is necessary to sign on to the ESO User Portal before using this forum. If you already have signed on, you can directly go to the forum index and select the desired forum. Otherwise, following that link will redirect you to the sign-on page.The link "My Profile" at the top of the pages can be used to reveal additional information to other users of the forum and customize some aspects of the forum interface.

Posting a message

Messages can be posted by starting a "new topic" or via "post reply" to an existing topic. Before posting any message in the forum, please take the time to read through the following short instructions.

You can post questions and requests for information as well as solutions found for a particular problem. In both cases, before posting a message, the existing posts should be reviewed first. If a related discussion exists, please attach your message to that topic.

The forums are organized by categories. There are separate categories for VLT and La Silla instruments, as well as non-instrument specific categories for software, calibration and miscellaneous topics. Please make sure to post to the most appropriate forum.

If you post any scripts or other software, please provide some documentation and specify the requirements to run this software, such as the exact version of the environment used for testing. Every software should be accompanied by at least one set of test data which works with the software.

If you post any calibration data, please specify exactly to what instrument configuration it applies, such the exact date of the data it was tested on. Also, please provide at least one data set to which the calibration data apply.